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Autonomia
Post-Political Politics
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi
with a new introduction by Sylvère Lotringer, "In the Shadow of the
Red Brigades"
Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the
time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the
American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of
Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in
the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to
realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together as events in Italy
were unfolding, the Autonomia issue--which has no equivalent in Italy,
or anywhere for that matter--arrived too late, but it remains an
energizing account of a movement that disappeared without bearing a
trace, but with a big future still ahead of it.
--Sylvère Lotringer
Semiotext(e) is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue
Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York
in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the
direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the
Autonomist movement (including Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Franco
Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna, and Franco
Berardi), this volume is the only first-hand document and
contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68
radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when
Autonomia members were falsely accused of (and prosecuted for) being
the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the
end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way
this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and
nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and
intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the
wake of Empire. In the next two years, Semiotext(e) will publish eight
books by such Italian "Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri,
Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and Bifo, as they update the theories
of Autonomia for the new century.
Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York
and Baja, California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting
Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007).
Christian Marazzi, an Italian economist, lives in Switzerland. He is
the author of Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War
Economy and Sock's Place, both forthcoming from Semiotext(e).
